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“You’ve spent quite some time in the lingerie department, but you haven’t even peeked at our display of Bose® ‘OE2′ Audio Headphones, which were $149.95 but are now ONLY $134.96! Can we talk?”

OK, so that’s not exactly what Nordstrom says it’s planning to do with the information it gleans from tracking customers’ movements throughout their stores.

But it certainly could market that aggressively, now that the department store – purveyor of apparel, shoes, jewelry, and the like – has implemented technology to track how much time you spend in specific departments within 17 stores in the US.

Tara Darrow, a company spokeswoman, told CBS DFW that sensors in the stores are collecting information from customers’ smartphones as those phones automatically scan for WiFi service.

Darrow said that the sensors monitor which departments you visit and for how long, but the sensors don’t actually follow your phone from department to department, and they don’t identify personal information tied to a phone’s owner:

"This is literally measuring a signal. You are not connected to the signal."

Nordstrom plugged in the technology in October but hasn’t yet done anything with the data it’s collected.

It’s referring to that data as “anonymous aggregate reports that give us a better sense of customer foot traffic”.

Nordstrom says it will eventually use these anonymous aggregate reports to enhance the shopping experience by, for example, increasing staffing during high-traffic times, keeping more registers open, or by tweaking a department’s layout.

The store is posting signs to alert customers and to tell them that if they want to opt out they can turn off their phones.

CBS DFW spoke to John Fu, marketing director of Euclid, the company that provides the tracking service. Apparently, while the company provides technology to collect information about us, it’s wary about disclosing information about its clients, citing, ironically enough, privacy concerns.

Fu did tell CBS DFW that Euclid serves a “variety of different kinds of retail stores, ranging from mom & pop stores and coffee shops to large department stores.”

Well, I guess that’s better than what Google was doing with WiSpy, when its StreetView cars were roaming neighborhoods worldwide, collecting emails, text messages, browsing histories and passwords from unsecured wireless networks.

If anything, this is a clear reminder regarding how much information our smartphones leak about us.

Smartphones constantly ping for WiFi service if you have WiFi turned on, whether you use it or not, as long as the phone isn’t shut down.

Do they stop pinging once they’re powered down?

That depends, according to Tom Henderson, principal researcher at ExtremeLabs, who tells me that phones that come back on instantly after being shut down haven’t actually been powered off; they’re just in a very-low-power-consumption mode.

A fast start indicates standby mode and a possible periodic location beacon. For that fast-start type of phone, users need to take the battery out if they’re worried about locational privacy.

As Julian Bhardwaj wrote about for Sophos last October, leaving WiFi turned on can let your phone leak all sorts of useful things for malicious actors to intercept and act upon.

One example: smartphones often broadcast the names (SSIDs) of your favorite networks for anyone to see.

That’s enough for someone to figure out where you work, where you live or your favorite coffee shop.

Worse still, it could allow an attacker to set up a rogue WiFi with the same SSID as one of your preferred networks, so as to launch a man-in-the-middle attack and thereby intercept data sent between you and others.

There’s no easy way to disable active wireless scanning on Androids or iPhones, but Bhardwaj did suggest two steps that can help keep your smartphone data safe:

Tell your phone to forget networks you no longer use, so as to minimise the amount of data leakage.

In the meantime, if you like to shop at Nordstrom but don’t like the idea of location tracking, turn your phone off and take the battery out if it’s a fast-start phone before you head into one of the stores that are equipped with these sensors.

I'd have thought that "Flight" or "Airplane" mode would do the trick. IIRC, that inhibits _all_ electromagnetic radiation emissions (except light from the screen 🙂 including GSM, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, even IR.

Good luck taking the battery out of modern mobile devices such as tablets and iDevices…

retailers are getting out of hand. I work fo a retailer (formally now) but once I was looking up a product for a cutomer not me. When I got home there was an email that said hey we noticed you were looking at this item, but did not buy-how can we get you to buy it?

are you Effn kidding me this stalker BS has got to go, besides these companies could keep data secure if their lives depended on it nuff said.

Sensors near check-out lanes where you pay with a personally identifiable credit card are the next step. Sure, walking around the store may leave you as a relatively anonymous cell phone signal, but not when you willfully identify yourself at check-out.

Could you not just turn off your wifi instead of turning off your phone. That seems to be what you were alluding to with the location aware smartphone app, but wouldn't manually switching off wireless be just as effective as turning off your phone?

Our new million dollar WiFi computer tracking system detected 27 customers hanging around a closed register between 4:55 and 5:33. Based on our proprietary computer tracking algorithms we may want to consider scheduling a sales clerk to be on the floor in the future.

Notice to Nordstrom Security from WiFi Data Department.

We noted that 1277 people entered the store today and 1276 left, we better analyze that data, we may have a lost customer around one of the closed registers?

Interesting. I suppose that there are a lot of people who just won’t care at all that they are being tracked and targeted. For myself, it will be a pretty cold day in Hades before Nordstrom sees any business from YT. It’s irritating enough to have nearly every vendor ask if you have our “Customer Loyalty” card so we can track your purchases. Now some one is going to track me while I shop? Horse pucky.

Not a bad idea. Sort of like clearing cookies every time you exit your browser. Of course if you're running a hotspot on your phone/table/portable Wi-Fi unit, you'll need to change the network name, too…

I leave WiFi off by default so I'm not that concerned today though the next step would be passive cellular radio detectors. And I would not consider this anonymous data. Tracking your WiFi signal to a register and correlating that with purchase info using a credit card means you're no longer anonymous. Gee, mister, I hope that lingerie is for your wife.

It isn't just price that's driving consumers to online purchases.

BTW, if you want to turn WiFi off make sure it stays off. Sprint in the US, for instance, by default deploys a "Connections Optimizer" that will turn WiFi on to hunt for access points to use instead of cellular data. So be sure any apps like this are also disabled.